“Rita, without saying anything to this, crossed the street back again to the warehouse full of oranges where she spent most of her waking hours.  Her dreaming, empty, idle, thoughtless, unperturbed hours, she calls them.  She crossed the street with a hole in her stocking.  She had a hole in her stocking not because her uncle and aunt were poor (they had around them never less than eight thousand oranges, mostly in cases) but because she was then careless and untidy and totally unconscious of her personal appearance.  She told me herself that she was not even conscious then of her personal existence.  She was a mere adjunct in the twilight life of her aunt, a Frenchwoman, and her uncle, the orange merchant, a Basque peasant, to whom her other uncle, the great man of the family, the priest of some parish in the hills near Tolosa, had sent her up at the age of thirteen or thereabouts for safe keeping.  She is of peasant stock, you know.  This is the true origin of the ‘Girl in the Hat’ and of the ‘Byzantine Empress’ which excited my dear mother so much; of the mysterious girl that the privileged personalities great in art, in letters, in politics, or simply in the world, could see on the big sofa during the gatherings in Allegre’s exclusive Pavilion:  the Dona Rita of their respectful addresses, manifest and mysterious, like an object of art from some unknown period; the Dona Rita of the initiated Paris.  Dona Rita and nothing more—­unique and indefinable.”  He stopped with a disagreeable smile.

“And of peasant stock?” I exclaimed in the strangely conscious silence that fell between Mills and Blunt.

“Oh!  All these Basques have been ennobled by Don Sanche II,” said Captain Blunt moodily.  “You see coats of arms carved over the doorways of the most miserable caserios.  As far as that goes she’s Dona Rita right enough whatever else she is or is not in herself or in the eyes of others.  In your eyes, for instance, Mills.  Eh?”

For a time Mills preserved that conscious silence.

“Why think about it at all?” he murmured coldly at last.  “A strange bird is hatched sometimes in a nest in an unaccountable way and then the fate of such a bird is bound to be ill-defined, uncertain, questionable.  And so that is how Henry Allegre saw her first?  And what happened next?”

“What happened next?” repeated Mr. Blunt, with an affected surprise in his tone.  “Is it necessary to ask that question?  If you had asked how the next happened. . .  But as you may imagine she hasn’t told me anything about that.  She didn’t,” he continued with polite sarcasm, “enlarge upon the facts.  That confounded Allegre, with his impudent assumption of princely airs, must have (I shouldn’t wonder) made the fact of his notice appear as a sort of favour dropped from Olympus.  I really can’t tell how the minds and the imaginations of such aunts and uncles are affected by such rare visitations.  Mythology may give us a hint.  There is the story of Danae, for instance.”